The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (14 page)

In less than an hour, I'd picked up the jeep and was on my way to Challenger Video on West Eleventh.

Challenger Video was pretty low-key. No security badges. I could probably just wander on in and no one would care. The company occupied what used to be an auto repair and tire shop just up the street from one of our favorite tropical fish stores—Scarface is the fish fancier. We don't actually have any fish, but he's always lobbying for us to get some. We let him look. Anyway you see the fish store and you slow way down because you've got to make a tricky left turn to get into the parking lot of Challenger Video.

The bays for auto repair had been boarded over, but you could still tell what the building once was. I imagined I could still smell old oil and hot tires and gasoline. There were no windows on this side of the building. There was a door with a small crude sign that told you the name of the enterprise inside.

Challenger had been around a long time, and while they didn't make a lot of money, they made money consistently. Years ago I heard they nearly changed their name after the shuttle disaster. But they hadn't and it hadn't seemed to hurt them much.

I pulled open the door and walked on in.

The place was bright with cloudy light through huge skylights along the backside of the roof. The inside of the building had been completely gutted and was now one big room with desks scattered in what seemed a random arrangement. On each desk was at least one computer monitor, most had more; cables snaked around on the floor between the desks and around the walls, and I wondered how the propeller heads avoided tripping and shorting out the whole operation. There was a bank of soft drink and snack machines along one wall and a table holding a huge silver coffee machine and a microwave. Three refrigerators.

Of the two dozen or so people hard at work, not even one looked up when I came in. I stood by the desk of a woman who was sitting very close to her monitor. I mean her nose was about three inches from the screen. I cleared my throat. No response. Everyone here would be in a world of their own. The level of concentration was so high you could almost hear the brain electricity buzzing like busy bees.

“Excuse me,” I said, and the woman yelped, banged her nose against her screen, and jumped up out of her chair.

“Jesus,” she said. “Who are you? And why are you sneaking up on me? Ouch.” She rubbed her nose. She ran a hand through her hair. She sat back down, forgetting or maybe just ignoring me.

“Can you tell me which one of you is Leo Unger?” I asked before she drifted off the planet again.

“What?”

“Leo.”

“Who?”

“Leo Unger.” I made a sweeping gesture meant to indicate all the other people in the room. There was no way to tell if she was even aware there were other people in the room, but she must have figured it out.

She pointed to her left and said, “Over there.”

I went through the whole routine again twice more before the creature I startled up from its hiding place turned out to be Leo Unger.

“I'm looking into the death of Randy Casey,” I said. I paid some close attention to the look on Leo's face when I said the name, but the reaction I saw was not so easy to interpret.

“Randy was a good guy,” Leo said.

“Did you hear about Sadie Campbell?”

“Her, too,” he said. “What's going on?”

Leo was a small man with very red hair tied back in a ponytail that ran down to the middle of his back. He hadn't shaved for a while, but I couldn't decide if it was that half-shaved look so popular a few years ago, or if he just hadn't been home for a while. Maybe the latter if his smell was anything to go by. Computer folks are often the most fragrant among us.

“So, what do you think got Randy killed?” I asked.

“How would I know,” Leo said. “There's a guy on-line saying the killer is knocking off people who make mistakes in documentation.”

“That's a polite way of putting it,” I said. “What do you think?”

“People think this is so easy,” Leo said. I could see he was getting steamed over the thought that people didn't know how hard he worked. “I mean, they think you can just tell the user how to use the software, just say what buttons to push and what's supposed to happen when you push them. No one appreciates how hard it is to say just what a person needs to know just when he needs it. Especially in a linear form like a book!” He tapped a fingernail on his screen. “This is going to change everything.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“Hypertext,” Leo said. “No more paper. Everything is on the screen. Each concept is linked up. What you need to know when you need to know it! You control everything.”

“So if Randy had written his stuff as a hypertext document he would have been safe?”

“Well, I don't know about that,” Leo said. “Randy thought he was some kind of hotshot artist when it came to documentation. The truth is he made a better game player. You know, someone who can really get into the games and live there.”

“So the thing he posted to you guys isn't very good?”

“No,” Leo said, “it's not very good.”

“So, why didn't he do it in hypertext?”

“I wouldn't let him,” Leo said. “This stuff is going to save us from that printed garbage, and I just wasn't ready to let Randy screw it up. All the good stuff is hypertext.”

Leo was still pretty red in the face. Looking at him I could believe he could work himself into a killing rage. This was a guy who belonged on my suspect list.

He must have seen something in my expression. He narrowed his eyes. Maybe it was occurring to him at last that I hadn't actually said I was with the police. Since I still had questions, I decided I'd better get to them quickly.

“What about Ramona Simmons?” I asked.

Leo gave me a grin. “You know Ramona?”

“Never had the pleasure,” I said. “I thought maybe you could fill me in. What's her story?”

“She's mean,” Leo said. “Really really mean.”

“So, she slaps you around a lot or what?”

“Actually, I've never seen her,” Leo said. “But no matter what you say on-line, she'll come jumping down your throat for it. And the thing is you can't ignore her because what she says is designed just for you. I mean it's perfectly structured to get your goat no matter who you are. She finds your weak spots and pokes them.”

“I can't believe you guys,” I said. “Don't any of you ever do anything in the flesh?”

“Sure we do,” he said. “We do lots of stuff in the flesh.” He looked away like he was worried I might ask him to name one.

“Make sure your insurance policy is paid up before you drop in on Ramona.” Leo glanced at his screen then back up at me. He rearranged his ass in his chair. I could see it was time for me to get on down the road.

“Watch yourself, Leo,” I said. “All the dead guys were on the BOD list.”

After I left Leo I swung on by South High School and checked out the yearbook. The secretary in the main office got the idea that I represented a company that printed these things. She kept telling me that Mr. Adams the journalism teacher would be free to talk with me at three. I thanked her for her time, but I didn't stick around to talk to Mr. Adams. I photocopied the page with Bernie's picture on it, and took down his address. Talking to a high school kid was pretty low on my list of priorities, but I would get around to it if nothing else came up.

On the way back to the office, I got to thinking about juice again. I thought how nice it would be to have some of that juice right now. I couldn't carry Yuri's machine around with me, but I could mix up a batch and carry it around in a big Thermos bottle. If I had such a bottle, which I didn't. I love problems with easy solutions. I dropped in at one of those everything-anyone-could-possibly-want warehouse stores and bought a Thermos bottle.

I drove back downtown and parked the jeep next to Lulu's Escort. Took my new Thermos upstairs.

My door was closed but not locked. I knew I'd locked it. I froze with my hand on the knob. Yuri and Prudence could have returned. They didn't seem to have any trouble with my door. Maybe they'd lifted a key when I was out of it. On the other hand, if there was someone in my office, it might be someone waiting to do me harm. There could even be a burglar in there who had nothing to do with anything else in my life. That would be the worst, I thought, to be killed by a bad guy who didn't have anything to do with your cases, who didn't even know who you were.

I could just charge into the office, but that would probably be a dumb move. I eased my hand off the knob. I'd sneak on down the hall and call the police from one of the neighboring offices. If I could catch anyone in. The Magazines-by-Phone woman sometimes worked afternoons. I'd seen her come and go. Maybe I could use her phone. Or I could just leave the building and use a pay phone on the mall. I turned to move quietly away.

The door behind me flew open and someone grabbed me.

I saw the side of his face as he spun me around, and I saw the gun. In one motion he was going to snatch me back into my office, spin me around, and shoot me.

I swung my own right hand up, the one with my new gray Thermos bottle. My arch was a little shorter, or I was a little faster, or maybe a little more desperate. My Thermos crunched into the man's nose before he could bring his gun around. He stepped back and crashed into the door. I grabbed his hand with the gun and hit him in the face with my Thermos again.

This was the guy who had jumped me at GP Ink. He was way too big for me to handle ordinarily. And he had a gun. All I had going for me was that he hadn't expected me to be carrying something I could hit him in the face with. I hit him again and jerked at the gun in his hand. He didn't let go of it. I raised a knee for his crotch but he twisted away and pushed me, and I stumbled back, tripped over one of the white plastic client chairs and scrambled on my hands and knees around behind the desk.

All the drawers were open, the contents scattered around on the floor. It was times like these that I wished I had the nerve to defy Frank Wallace and all the people who had decided I shouldn't be allowed to carry a gun under my coat. If I had just done it anyway, I could be squeezing off shots at this very moment.

I'd hit him hard, so blood might be running into his eyes. I could roll to the side and come up at the side of the desk with my gun in hand and yell, “Freeze.”

I did it anyway.

Yes, the blood was running into his eyes, and he squinted at me crouched there pointing my six-shooter finger at him. I had time for only a quick mental snapshot of him running one hand over his damaged face, trying to see me through the blood and his fingers, the other hand with the gun coming up for a shot, before he ducked out the door and slammed it behind him.

I scrambled to my feet. It would hit him any minute that I hadn't really had a gun when I'd shouted “Freeze!” Once he realized that, he'd pop right back inside, and I'd be a sitting duck. I rushed to the window and pulled it open.

The alley was three stories down. There was a ledge about five feet below my window. I climbed out over the sill and lowered myself onto the ledge. I turned my back to the building and shuffled off to my right toward the street.

One really scary thing about standing on a narrow ledge, with a building keeping your back straight and an alley three stories below, is the way the building seems to tip you forward. It seems the building will tilt just a little and you'll be windmilling your arms as you make the big plunge. Or you'll get dizzy. Lose yourself for a second, and you'll get to see how well you fly. I took another couple of shuffling steps toward the street. I really wanted to be around the corner before the bad guy poked his head out of my office window.

Down below in the alley, a guy in a dirty white apron came out of the building next door. He dumped his trash in the dumpster and on the way back just happened to look up and see me standing on the ledge.

He did a double take you could see even from where I was standing. “Don't jump!” he shouted and ran back into his building.

“Quiet,” I whispered, but he was gone anyway.

A couple of people stopped at the mouth of the alley and looked up at me. Moments later a crowd had gathered. I heard a siren not too far off in the distance. The guy in the apron came back with his coworkers. At least now if the bad guy leaned out of my office window and shot me, there would be quite a few witnesses.

Uniformed police officers scattered the crowd. Another siren approached. Just after the fire truck pulled up, a man did poke his head out of my office window, and I jerked around to look and almost fell.

But then I saw it wasn't the big guy with the gun. This man had a serene smile. He looked like everybody's grandfather. “You want to talk about it, Son?”

“Jesus,” I said. “I'm not out here to jump!”

I looked down at the firemen below. They had one of those round things they used to catch falling people, but they were having some trouble deploying it in the alley. I shuffled back toward the window.

“That's the ticket,” the suicide negotiator said. “Just take it easy and keep coming.”

Greta, my Psychic Sidekick, would probably tell me that I'd had a premonition of all of this earlier when I thought I would have to deal with the police over my stolen jeep. The reason I'd forgotten I'd left the jeep at Mom's nursing home was just so I'd think of the police, which would warn me about the police experience I'd have after someone broke into my office and chased me out on the ledge.

My office was full of uniformed police officers. The guy who had “talked me in” turned me over to them at once and left. I was handcuffed behind my back. We took a little trip down to the police station, and I spent the rest of the day sitting around waiting to tell my story.

Once I did get to explain myself, it was still another hour before I could make anyone believe me. Finally, they agreed to check it out and sent me back to my office with a young uniformed officer named Hamilton.